Part 13 (1/2)
”You might as well kill me now,” she said in her little-girl voice. ”I won't tolerate your abuse anymore.”
Arkadin pulled her back inside the room, let go of her. ”What are you going to do,” he said with a smirk, ”jump out the window?”
No sooner had the words come out of his mouth than she walked calmly to the window and sat on the sash, staring at him all the time. Then she tipped herself backward, through the open window. Arkadin grabbed her around the legs and hauled her up from the brink.
They stood glaring at each other, breathing fast, hearts pumping with excess adrenaline.
”Yesterday, while we were on the ladder, told me that you had nothing much to live for,” Devra said. ”That pretty much goes for me, too. So here we both are, brothers under the skin, with nothing but each other.”
”How do I know the next link in the network is Turkey?”
She drew her hair back from her face. ”I'm tired of lying to you,” she said. ”It's like lying to myself. What's the point?”
”Talk is cheap,” he said.
”Then I'll prove it to you. When we get to Turkey I'll take you to the doc.u.ment.”
Arkadin, trying not to think too much about what she said, nodded his acknowledgment of their uneasy truce. ”I won't lay a hand on you again.”
Except to kill you, he thought.
Twelve.
THE FREER GALLERY of Art stood on the south side of the Mall, bounded on the west by the Was.h.i.+ngton Monument and on the east by the Reflecting Pool, gateway to the immense Capitol building. It was situated on the corner of Jefferson Drive and 12th Street, SW, near the western edge of the Mall.
The building, a Florentine Renaissance palazzo faced with Stony Creek granite imported from Connecticut, had been commissioned by Charles Freer to house his enormous collection of Near East and East Asian art. The main entrance on the north side of the building where the meet was to take place consisted of three arches accented by Doric pilasters surrounding a central loggia. Because its architecture looked inward, many critics felt it was a rather forbidding facade, especially when compared with the nearby exuberance of the National Gallery of Art.
Nevertheless, the Freer was the preeminent museum of its kind in the country, and Soraya loved it not only for the depth of art it housed but also for the elegant lines of the palazzo itself. She especially loved the contained open s.p.a.ce at its entrance, and the fact that even, as now, when the Mall was agitated with hordes of tourists heading to and from the Smithsonian Metro rail stop on 12th Street, the Freer itself was an oasis of calm and tranquility. When things boiled over in the office during the day, it was to the Freer she came to decompress. Ten minutes with Sung dynasty jades and lacquers acted like a soothing balm to her soul.
Approaching the north side of the Mall, she searched past the crowds outside the entrance to the Freer and thought she saw-among the st.u.r.dy men with their hard, clipped Midwestern accents, the scampering children and their laughing mothers, the vacant-eyed teenagers plugged into their iPods-Veronica Hart's long, elegant figure walking past the entrance, then doubling back.
She stepped off the curb, but the blare of a horn from an oncoming car startled her back onto the sidewalk. It was at that moment that her cell phone buzzed.
”What exactly do you think you're doing?” Bourne said in her ear.
”Jason?”
”Why are you coming to this meet?”
Foolishly, she looked around; she'd never be able to spot him, and she knew it.
”Hart invited me. I need to talk to you. The DCI and I both do.”
”About what?”
Soraya took a deep breath. ”Typhon's listening posts have picked up a series of disturbing communications pointing to an imminent terrorist attack on an East Coast city. The trouble is, that's all we have. Worse, the communications are between two cadres of a group about which we have no intel whatsoever. It was my idea to recruit you to find them and stop the attack.”
”Not much to go on,” Bourne said. ”Doesn't matter. The group's name is the Black Legion.”
”In grad school I studied the link between a branch of Muslim extremism and the Third Reich. But this can't be the same Black Legion. They were either killed or disbanded when n.a.z.i Germany fell.”
”It can and it is,” Bourne said. ”I don't know how it managed to survive, but it did. Three of their members tried to kidnap Professor Specter this morning. I saw their device tattooed on the gunman's arm.”
”The three horses' heads joined by the death's head?”
”Yes.” Bourne described the incident in detail. ”Check the body at the morgue.”
”I'll do that,” Soraya said. ”But how could the Black Legion remain so far underground all this time without being detected?”
”They have a powerful international front,” Bourne said. ”The Eastern Brotherhood.”
”That sounds far-fetched,” Soraya said. ”The Eastern Brotherhood is in the forefront of IslamicWestern relations.”
”Nevertheless, my source is unimpeachable.”
”G.o.d in heaven, what've you been doing while you've been away from CI?”
”I was never in CI,” Bourne said brusquely, ”and here's just one reason why. You say you want to talk with me but I doubt you need half a dozen agents to do that.”
Soraya froze. ”Agents?” She was on the Mall itself now, and she had to restrain herself from looking around again. ”There are no CI agents here.”
”How d'you know that?”
”Hart would've told me-”
”Why should she tell you anything? We go way back, you and I.”
”That's true enough.” She kept walking. ”But something happened earlier today that makes me believe the agents you've spotted are NSA.” She described the way she and Hart had been shadowed from CI HQ to the restaurant. She told him about Secretary Halliday and Luther LaValle, both of whom were gunning to make CI a part of the Pentagon clandestine service.
”That might make sense,” Bourne said, ”if there were only two of them. But six? No, there's another agenda, one neither of us knows about.”
”Such as?”
”The agents are vectored perfectly, triangulated on the entrance to the Freer,” Bourne said. ”This means that they must have had foreknowledge of the meet. It also means the six weren't sent to shadow Veronica Hart. If they aren't here for her, they must have been sent for me. This is Hart's doing.”
Soraya felt a chill crawl down her spine. What if the DCI was lying to her? What if she meant all along to lead Bourne into a trap? It would make sense for one of her first official acts as DCI to be the capture of Jason Bourne. It certainly would put her in solidly with Rob Batt and the others who despised and feared Bourne, and who resented her. Plus, capturing Jason would score her big points with the president and prevent Secretary Halliday from building on his already considerable influence. Still, why would Hart have allowed Soraya to possibly muck up her first field op by coming along? No, she had to believe this was an NSA initiative.
”I don't believe that,” she said emphatically.
”Let's say you're right. The other possibility is just as dire. If Hart didn't set the trap, then there's someone highly placed in CI who did. I went to Hart directly with the request.”
”Yes,” she said, ”using my cell, thank you very much.”
”Did you find it? You're on a new one now.”
”It was in the gutter where you tossed it.”